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Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD III

The third version of the Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD is based on openSUSE-12.1 and will run on x86_64 compatible PC´s. I placed the ISO image yesterday after some preparations on the better accessible SourceForge site for download. The CD project starts into a instantly colour managed desktop, which is unique under Linux.

The ICC desktop colour correction is done by the CompICC colour server. The LiveCD contains the usual mixture of colour managed graphics applications. Among them is the colour management system Oyranos, the KDE Color Management panel, a profiler based on Argyll CMS and many colour management aware applications for drawing, colour analysis and desktop publishing. Due to package size changes not even all programs from the last release are covered. I am very sorry for that. Nevertheless I decided to include Firefox, as a very wide spread every days application. After fixing a bug in Firefox, the web browser is usable under CompICC and has generally improved regarding colour management. But still it has many colour management related issues.

The desktop widget contains some test images to help you verifying, your desktop is setup correctly and works inside all colour managed applications. Covered are some JPEG, PNG, TIFF and SVG images with wide gamut and swapped channel test profiles. You will surely spot problems, as not everything in Linux desktops is really polished regarding colour management. But these test data can help you in getting a sense of, what can be relied on and what not. You can easily include other applications into your test by installing from openSUSE. And please help the projects and report bugs to the according project bug trackers. This will show interest in the issues seen with colour management and helps developers spot current weaknesses, which are otherwise overseen.

The CD uses the stable version of the Compiz compositing window manager, which is the only one being able to run under KDE. While the Oyranos CMS is packaged in openSUSE, a full screen desktop colour correction is currently not possible with KDE´s KWin or any window manager other than Compiz with the CompICC plugin. One difference to the previous LiveCD is a better useable nouveau driver, which since greatly improved and can now launch into Compiz with GPU acceleration.

7 thoughts on “Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD III”

I gave this CD a whirl. First impressions were not, however, encouraging. Despite the claim that it “starts into a instantly colour managed desktop” the bileous gren background was an instant giveaway tha colour management was not happening. Apparently my wide gamut display was being treated as sRGB. There was no documentation of how the system assigned a monitor profile, and although a search found a number of ICC profiles none seemed to relate to my display.

I had hoped that I would be prompted to calibrate the display on startup, but this ws not the case (and my colorimeter was apparently not detected). Maybe then it reads the EDID and chooses from some dfatabase of profiles? If so , its not clear where tha database is. The display widget had no information about a system monitor profile.

I was able to load ICC Examin and look at some of the provided sample profiles (which is good as had previously failed to compile it on ubuntu) and visualise the gamut in 3D (with a lot of flickering and screen blackouts, presumably a video driver issue).

I was able to look at the provided sample images, the raster ones opened in CinePaint and the vector one in Inkscape.

The livecd would not let me read or write to the internal drives aand claimed that tan external drive had an unsupported filesystem (ntfs) so i was unable to copy sample images, icc profiles or screenshots of gamut visualisations. I will try again to see if it can write to a fat32 SD card.

Concrete suggestions for improvement:
- provide a readme or better, some html documentation to get people started
- explain where the monitor profile comes from, how it is set, how to contribute profiles for your hardware, and how to check it is installed and working correctly
- explain how to start Argyll with the display gui front end
- put the installed programs on the KDE menu (some were but not all)
- allow the user to select English UI for ICC Examin and CinePaint

For writing to a existing partition I launched the dolphin file manager available from the dock. I was prompted by a root password dialog and typed in the system password, which is “linux” for this CD.

The CD is meant for average users and colour geeks. So prompting for a specialised procedure like profiling is not in scope.

Could you extract the EDID from the root window or output property? If that is available, then Oyranos CMS can create a ICC profile from EDID on the fly, which is together with a launched Compiz/CompICC the base for instant colour management of the display. The small icon in the systray should be colourd to show CompICC is running. To see the profile associated with monitor, you can use several methods. One is the Color Management panels device tab in KDE system settings panel. An other method is to call oyranos-monitor -lc. The -c option is needed to see the actual device profile and not the document profile, with the later normally being sRGB. To see the profile in ICC Examin use:
$ oyranos-monitor -c -f icc | iccexamin -i

The LiveCD is a stock openSUSE-12.1 with some additional packages and patches applied and brings all advantages and some pain. Hope you can solve to write to disk.

Thanks for the suggestions. I will place a README file and think I can disable the german locale preselection. Once we update to the actual dispcalGUI, the explanation for profile upload would make sense.
(edited)

I had hoped that I would be prompted to calibrate the display on startup, but this ws not the case

Yes, this would be nice yet-to-be-implemented functionality. Imho, when a measurement device gets plugged in, the system could ask (via a dialog or preferably a small, not modal popup) if it should launch the calibration software, with the usual option to “not ask again”. This also would mean there needs to be a place where users can set the preferred calibration software, and some system (udev?) needs to detect the instrument and act accordingly. Maybe an idea for the next GSoC?

How about putting that topic on OpenICC together with a small suggestion about key name + possible values? Then the GCM and KolorManager projects can implement it and display to users. For a GSoC project that might be overkill.